New answers tagged medieval
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The guardians have a sort of magical radioactivity to them.
The magic used to animate them steadily poisons those they spend time around. It took a few generations of kings to figure this out, but now they're used primarily for guarding tombs where this sort of side effect doesn't cause any undue problems (if anything, it would act as an even better ...
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TL; DR - Hot sword is better for roasting its wielder than chopping up their enemies
Looking at this from a heat transfer perspective, this sword has some problems that are going to make it unusable. dspeyer's answer notes the danger of spontaneous ignition of clothing. I'm going to address what happens to the wielder in the case where nothing spontaneously ...
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Just use all that power and electrocute the knight in its shiny armour. 😬
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Never mind its brittleness at 3000C or otherwise ...
unless your sword fights are in a perfect vacuum or a halon or noble gas atmosphere, it'll burn with the oxygen in air long before it reaches 3000K.
Anywhere tungsten is heated it is kept enveloped in inert gas - either as a lightbulb filament, in the glass envelope - or as a TIG welding rod where T ...
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If you could make a glowing sword people would either revere you as some kind of saint or fear you as some kind of witch and have you put to death so actually your glowing sword, back pack and whatnot would actually be the least of your worries, I'd be more inclined to use the sword to make toast...that's a win for everyone.
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The Guardians aren't really there to keep graverobbers out of the tomb. They're there to keep things in.
Funeral rites are on the face of them, rituals to to soothe the loved ones, and also allow the dead to pass on to their destination, whatever it may be. By channeling the thoughts and prayers of the mourners into the rite, their will and mana is used to ...
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Site your restaurant in a seaport; and make friends with shipowners and sea captains. They eat free all year round, if they add a few sacks of rice, dried fruit or meats, or spices to their cargo, or (for only the fastest ships ... maybe favours from the Navy) fresh oranges from Seville or bananas (picked green) from West Africa.
Especially if they travel ...
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Gauntlets, security, accessibility and coordination. Plus falls and loot.
Assumptions: A teleport scroll will only take a single adventurer and the items that adventurer is wearing / carrying. If this assumption is incorrect then there are lots of potential problems (how much of the ground they are standing on is teleported with them?) and a very simple ...
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It doesn't work everywhere
You need to be in a clearing, or at an intersection of ley lines for it to work. It's easy to reach a suitable spot if you're freely walking around, but if you're being chased by a monster or trapped down a well, you often don't have the time or ability to reach a teleportable spot.
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Tungsten is a useless material for this application, as it's very brittle. Its more useful cousin is tungsten carbide, which is a lot tougher, but it's still very brittle compared to most steels.
Most steels and titanium alloys get soft when heated, so if you want a heated weapon, your options are either tungsten carbide, or a super-alloy.
Inconel springs ...
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As already pointed out by O.M. golems could be very bad from telling friend from foe. The mobility of guardians built for strength is also a large issue.
Consider a busy Palace, with coming and goings of people seeking council from the King. Having some confused golems around not knowing who to clobber would be extremely problematic. The clumsiness of these ...
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Area of Effect
A variant on Plutian's idea.
The spell teleports the user to the intended location... along with every other person, aboveground object, or stray spell within a couple of yards. So an incoming axe or fireball just gets brought along, with its momentum conserved, and strikes you just as it would if you hadn't moved. More worryingly, an enemy ...
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There hasn't been a lot of innovation in cooking techniques, and preservation is mostly needed to have things year-round rather than in-season. The big difference is transportation. We take for granted meals combining ingredients that don't grow within a thousand miles of each other.
If you're attempting to recreate modern american food in medieval Europe,...
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Several options:
Who says that that is the case? Your fictional king has a couple of stone guardians in his palace.
Or the magic is powerful but it has a very limited active lifetime. The guardian cannot really fight forever, the spell gives it 24 hours of moving and fighting. If it takes 5 minutes to finish a group of intruders, that's enough for 288 "...
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Your blade is about 150 cm^3 of tungsten, roughly 3 kg. That's a lot of mass to heat up and maintain at 3000 K. The surface area of your sword is about 550 cm^2. More surface area will radiate away the energy faster requiring a large battery and also melting the user.
All that heat will be right near your face and hands making it possibly impossible to hold ...
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I suggest making your restaurant an ice cream parlor.
Most modern food preparation techniques were used in the middle ages. They did not have microwaves, but steaming or putting something to stand near the fire could get similar results, just slower. It was certainly possible to create foods similar to modern ones if the ingredients were available. To see ...
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Considering @In the name of the story’s update that the protagonist has modern refrigeration and transportation available to him/her, the only barrier should be the fact that many food ingredients would not be available in the place where the restaurant would open in. Assuming that the restaurant will open in Medieval Europe (as that’s what most people think ...
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YOLO
You only live once. You've fought many battles before and are still alive, so you are now over-confidant about your chances of survival. You simply don't expect to die, so there is no reason to escape a fight. And you wouldn't know at what point in a fight is the best time to escape.
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There was no refrigeration in the Middle Ages. So ingredients had to either be sourced locally, or preserved in some way. So no fresh oranges in Stockholm, for example.
The next problem you have is that some ingredients haven't been invented yet. Just as an example, look at all the different kinds of pepper the hot pepper community has invented in it's ...
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While Teleportation spell scrolls are cheap, there is a maximum ammount of teleports that can happen simultanously within the Manasphere of a planet. To cope with that limitation, spell scrolls come with a delay spell that keeps the actual teleportation magic from trying to overload the Manasphere by transmitting the spell into the Grand Magic Spire's spell ...
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Because they are not used
Simple as that.
@Daron answer is great, but even if the spell takes one second, it doesn't mean everyone would use it.
The problem isn't that one can't buy them, but that one usually that one can't use them.
If I get shot by an arrow in the head, I would die no matter if I had a portal scroll or not. I just didn't have time to ...
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Considering tungsten's melting point is 3,422 °C, your champion would be swinging something akin to a very hot wet noodle, so not very effective. Realize a blade in medieval times had semi-sharp edges, not to specifically cut through things, but to rather concentrate the force of the inertial energy being brought to bear by it. Even though tungsten is quite ...
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The heat adds absolutely no advantage against an armored opponent. To do damage, you'd have to hold the heated sword against the foe long enough for significant heat transfer to take place. But the foe is encased in steel, which is a good conductor & radiator of heat, so it disperses over the piece of armor that you're hitting, with some of it ...
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You show up naked.
source
The spell takes you, and only you. None of your loot, or supplies, or weapons. Also only live cells; your hair and fingernails stay behind too. If you have time to cache your stuff that is fine but that also means you might have time to figure out some way to escape with your stuff, and hair.
These adventurers are pretty ...
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The other answers are all good. In addition, maybe pride, maybe the adventurers are unlearned peasants in search of glory that don't understand the power of the scroll, maybe they put it in their back pocket and can't reach it in full armor, or maybe they just got killed too fast and had no time to grab their scroll.
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Side effects.
How fast you tear the scroll matters, as the faster you tear the scroll, the faster the ritual happens and the faster you get out of there. However, the faster the ritual happens, the higher the chance something goes wrong, such as teleporting without your blood, or upon arrival you don't have your left arm
Depending on any magical effects ...
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My first thought would be the length of the ritual, but this doesn't seem a factor.
The next would be if you were forced to return within a certain time, meaning your life would be in just as much peril as before. But since you state they can abandon a quest like this, this doesn't seem an option either.
One option could be that you would need to do it ...
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The Spell Takes a Few Minutes to Work
After you rip up the scroll the spell immediately starts working. But Teleportation spells are very complicated and the magic takes a few minutes to memorise where all the molecules in your body are located relative to each other. You must stay absolutely still for a few minutes while this happens, and only then are ...
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It would damage itself more than the opponent.
As other answers mentioned, Tungsten would be much too brittle to use, and shatter at the first strike(s).
If this can be overcome by changing the metal composition, you would run into different problems like heat dissapation making the handle too hot to hold.
Even if a structurally sound and handleable sword ...
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Also, doing some math on that battery...
The sword is about 1000x the volume of a light bulb filament. Assuming the energy cost is linear in volume (because I don't want to do really difficult math), this means we need 100kw. For 3 hours, 300kwh.
Our best LiON batteries get a bit under 300wh/kg, so this will weigh a metric ton.
It would require only ...
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As a very gross oversimplification, a knight in full armor was battered down, not cut down. That's why many knights carried a mace instead of a sword. Sure, a war hammer was used to penetrate the armor, but that was no sword, either.
Heating the sword means that a little heat is transferred on a blow, but as a gut feeling that won't be the main damaging ...
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3000C is very, very hot. Steel forges and glassblowers operate around 1000C. They wear protective gear just to stand near the stuff.
I know volcanologists have issues with their gear spontaneously catching fire due to the heat off of lava flows (again, roughly 1000C). Granted, the flows are a lot bigger than this sword. Still, I think contactless ...
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Yes, you have an effective weapon here. Just throw away the useless sword and find a way to get the battery pack to release all its energy at once instead of over three hours. It contains a lot of energy, and will make an excellent explosive device.
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Tungsten is very brittle. So brittle that it shatters when hit.
Your warrior will be helpless on the battlefield after the first blow.
Summary: it will work very poorly.
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The Griffin can store water in its feathers, it flies to a nearby lake, immerses itself, then carefully flies back.
The Sandgrouse is a type of pigeon that purposefully carries water in its feathers for its Chicks. The Chicks then 'milk' the carrier (either male or female) by sucking water from its feathers.
^Image of a Sandgrouse gathering water
The same ...
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All you get is light and a large enough peace of soil + water & some seeds. If you dont grow food for air and food you will starve and die.
If you eat your seeds - you will die.
Its basically a miniature world to be robinson crusoe in..
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Yes!
You can build just anything. You do not need much to start.
You need only 3 things
You have an advanced AI. You can build just anything:
Things that you know.
Things that you can imagine.
Things that you can not imagine.
But to build something, you need these three:
The physical elements as raw material
Any other raw material substance can be ...
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The griffin has enough limbs to be able to carry a bucket to the nearest river or lake, fill it and fly back. If it's a big griffin maybe it can carry enough in one trip to provide a day or more water for the lord. The problem would be getting the water into the cell...
You can have a hole in the door (or bars) big enough to get a meal through without too ...
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Give the dragons a different target.
Use fake houses - more just shaped piles of kindling that turn into a bonfire when set alight. Even use strawmen as well, to make it look habited. The real houses are all low profile, hidden underground wherever possible, but the decoy houses are used to draw the dragons fire elsewhere, to a safer part of the city.
The ...
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It's best to build your houses from either dirt (as mentioned by other answers) clay, brick and mortar, slate, or stone blocks. Any stone or aggregate based building material would stand up to fire much better than organic materials like wood and thatch. That being said, a bunch of napalm-like fire would still do significant damage, so damage control would ...
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Ask tribute to the locals
The lord not only controlled the castle, but also the whole region around it, and all the yokel that live there.
The griffin does not only control the castle, but also (even if it's less than the lord), the region. He can probably ask to one of this folk to gather some water and deliver it to the lord. Same can be done for food, ...
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You do realize that he's probably going to need water for more than just drinking, yes? If the griffin wants to keep him alive, that means taking into account basic hygiene, and that needs water.
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The frame of the house can be wood, but roofs, with proper reinforcement, can be slate. And the walls can be daub and wattle. The wooden wattles wouldn’t provide protection, but the daub would be fire proof since it is little more than gypsum and plaster, treated with water proofing.
Also, if needed, green hides of slaughtered animal could be nailed to ...
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If his food contains enough water, he doesn't actually need to drink. Maybe the griffin brings him mostly fruits and vegetables.
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In medieval times, this was given quite a lot of thought as castles were designed in most cases to survive a siege.
Food is an issue during a siege to be sure, but water more so; this ties into the law of 3s; you can survive 3 minutes without oxygen, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food. These are of course approximations, but you get the general ...
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Dirt
When all else fails, dirt is reasonably cheap and fire resistant. Build the house out of a frame, and then just slather a thick layer of mud all over the top and sides of the house which should provide a reasonable protection against fire. Also serves as a decent insulator too.
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A number of options.
The castle has a well within its walls so the lord can toss a bucket down and get water for himself. A more modern castle might have hand pumps in appropriate places so maybe no need for a bucket.
Assuming the castle isn't in a very dry region, rain could be collected from the roof and fed directly to cisterns, from which the lord can ...
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A critical design difference is that a piston engine works with a discrete cycle that can take any amount of time to complete (within reason) but a jet engine operates continuously.
If you look at the early history of the steam engine, you can make a useful practical device that only operates at one "rev per minute". Of course with an external combustion ...
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There is one type of jet engine that is easier to build than a piston engine and in an alt-history or alt-universe setting could be fun to contemplate. It is the engine used by the the original cruise missile - the V1 flying bomb: a pulsejet.
Pulsejets
Starting one is not easy but you can easily learn the skill with practice. People have built pulsejets in ...
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Theoretically, a turbine is mechanically simpler than a piston engine, and the principle could be understood by anyone familiar with a windmill. Leonardo da Vinci's "roasting jack" could be understood as a simple turbine devised to harvest the heat energy of the fire to perform mechanical work.
Leonardo's roasting jack
However, the real stopping point is ...
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